While it may not be the answer to everything, desktop virtualization offers a good solution for certain usage models, such as where access needs to be restricted to certain information or services, or where desktop management needs to be centralized. In the model, virtual instances of desktops send display information to remote screens, even though the processing is actually taking place on a server.

The model can put strains on the physical IT architecture, however. To avoid bottlenecks, it helps to have an understanding of what's going on in the underlying server, storage and network environment. As well as visibility on what’s running on each virtual machine, and how much resource it is consuming.

This brings us to desktop antivirus software which, like any other package, is going to be contending for processing cycles. With the best will in the world, if a hundred virtual desktops are running on the same server and accessing the same storage, and each...

Blog by Robert Mol, Director Product Marketing EMEA:

About a week ago I hosted an Executive Round Table on Consumerization of IT. Just outside the city of Brussels, Belgium a group of Enterprise customers from a variety of industries gathered for what can only be described as a Round Table with gastronomic excellence. After a gracious opening by our host and a last sip of the finest bubbly, my focus turned to discovering the perception of our guests on the Mobile Solutions and Services market. My primary question? Do they recognize the same explosive and disruptive change in the adoption of Mobile devices as presented by the analyst community and what are their key concerns? With representation from the Finance sector, Healthcare, Government, and Media,  this was looking to become a lively afternoon with likely very different perceptions amongst these senior IT leaders.

Read more here: Consumerization...

The term 'sprawl' seems to be gaining momentum in IT circles. The culprit, we are told, is virtualisation: while creating, duplicating and even cloning new virtual machines may be much simpler than procuring their physical equivalents, organisations can end up with so many of the things that they start causing management problems. IT isn't straightforward to manage at the best of times, and the usual issues of operations, patching and licensing can quickly get out of control if the number of systems gets out of hand.

One area in particular that can suffer problems is backups, and it's not rocket science to work out why. Backups require transfers of sometimes-large quantities of data, from system, application and user repositories: more machines equals more data to be transferred, which can increase pressure on physical server and network interfaces particularly if everything sis being backed up at once. Lose control of the systems in a sprawl situation, and...

Symantec is the leading mobile security provider of unified customer protection for the corporate, enterprise and individual mobile user. Next Generation Network Protection offers comprehensive proactive protection from the increasingly prominent threat of mobile viruses, malware, inappropriate content, unsolicited communications and spam at a corporate and consumer level – right in carrier networks. This is part of a service hierarchy that delivers unified protection and revenue generating services across all mobile and wireless bearers, for all technologies including messaging, internet and voice usage.

Download the whitepaper by clicking on the link below.